Some people seem to think that the moving picture has only been with us for a while. Those people are wrong, and miss out on a lot of beauty because of their arrogance.

Hidden in dusty attics and in dark corners of your movie rental store, old treasures lie hidden. Of course, a lot of these can also be purchased on a shiny new DVD disk.

These great classics have slipped from under copyright over the years, and can now be found on the internet, entirely legal and 100% free! Watch classic movies right from your browser, or download them to your computer via the following great sites.

You’ve probably heard of the Internet Archive before, they’re the guys who brought us the Wayback Machine, a tool to watch internet pages from way in the past. But archiving the internet isn’t limited to static HTML. If you take a closer look at the website, you’ll see that they’ve also collected a ton of audio, text, software and – moving images.

At the moment, a stunning 214,402 pieces of film can be found on the website. Once you browse over to the ‘Movies‘ category, you’ve still got 2,855 full-length feature films waiting for you. Of course, Whatever Works and G.I. Joe won’t be found here, but it’s a great place to watch your favorite classic movies all over again. Honestly, with the Internet Archive in the picture, you’ll rarely need to look at another site.

Movies can be browsed by subject, keywords, language or popularity. Once you’ve found your flick, you can stream it directly from the page, or download it in MPEG2, Ogg or MPEG4 – all in incredible picture quality.

Classic Cinema Online is another place to find your classic flicks. I especially like it because of the site’s interface, and use it to uncover ‘new’ titles that I haven’t seen before. The ‘Now Playing‘ bar shows – in cinema style – some of the newer, featured films. Alternatively, you can browse by popularity or film genre.

Unlike the Internet Archive, Classic Cinema online doesn’t host any of the films locally. Instead, they embed from popular video sharing sites like YouTube or Google Video. This means that – even though the streaming rate is very fine, the availability of classic movies to watch is less stable. If one of the video hosters decide to get rid of a film, you won’t be able to access it anymore on Classic Cinema Online.

Last but not least, Archive Classic Movies, abbreviated ACM. They’ve also got an impressive film archive, though noticeably smaller than the two preceding sites.

Archive Classic Movies does appear to host most of its movies locally. You can stream them at a decent rate, or download them as a surplus. The videos are encoded as MP4 files, and average around 400 MegaBytes.

I hope you’ve had some use of this post and earned yourself a few new bookmarks. Do you know any other sites to watch classic movies? Tell us and your fellow MakeUseOf readers in the comments section below!

I'm a writer and computer sciences student from Belgium. You can always do me a favor with a good article idea, book recommendation, or recipe idea. You'll also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.